I've got a Fender P-bass with Alembic pickups and I've got the symptoms of the output jack going-it's popping when I move the cord around.

I believe the jack has 4 pins on it (I'm not with my bass at the moment), but it's the black plastic style jack. My question is where can I buy another one of these? I got one from stewmac.com but it had more pins than the original one.

I'm hoping I can find a jack locally since I'm supposed to be going out of town with my bass on Friday. I attached a crappy pic to show you the old jack (and another one that I tried using) Thanks for the help!

Your description and picture are a little odd... I assume the plastic bodied jack is the one you're trying to replace, but it looks like you've got a new Switchcraft phone jack installed in the pickguard that looks like it should work just fine.

The piece you bought from StewMac will work fine too. For a mono-output instrument like yours, a stereo jack is wired in a tricky way. The tip carries the signal and the sleeve (the long cylindrical part of the plug) is the ground, just like a regular mono jack. But the other contact (the "ring") is wired to the battery power. When you stick a mono plug in a stereo jack, you short together the ring and sleeve and that powers up the electronics on your bass.

The jack you got from StewMac is a little more advanced. It has a real switch (actually a pair of them) that are flipped open or closed when a plug is inserted. You use a jack like this when you really want to bring a stereo output out on the tip and ring contacts but still want to switch the power on and off. The switch connections are the other 6 conductors on your jack. If you use this jack, you can use these contacts to switch power or you can just ignore them and use the tip, ring, and sleeve connectors.

The wiring for your new jack isn't that clear from the photo. For the Switchcraft jack that you have installed in the pickguard, the audio signal goes to the "top" lug in the photo (it's its on the opposite side of the plug from the longest contact which has a bend furthest from the hole). Ground wires for audio and power go to the middle lug. The bottom lug will be the wire that goes back directly to the battery clip. Is this a P/J bass? That would be the best explanation for all the ground wires (looks like 2 pickups+filter grounds and that audio is separate from that, but I can't really tell).

Thanks for your response. I managed to get the StewMac jack working just fine, I'm pleased to report!

And you're right that was a switchcraft jack. Do you think that would have worked just the same? The guitar tech I took it to said he had no idea how to wire it to the switchcraft. It took a bit of trial and error to get the StewMac jack working, but it seemed to work out just fine. Thanks for the detailed response!

I'm glad to hear that you got it working again. I think I've managed to find more annoying things in life these days, but I think the "intermittent jack" was right up there for me in years gone by.

You can definitely get the circuit working with the Switchcraft jack, but it's sort of a "trick" how that's done, and not so obvious when you are working from a setup that has a real power switch like your original jack.

So, is your bass really P? Just one split coil pickup? It seems like there's a *lot* of wires on the jack for a single pickup and electronics module!